Winifred Welles’s “Hail and Farewell” is a sonnet about the hardest kind of waiting: a child’s wait beside a dying mother. Its title already joins two opposite ceremonies—the “hail” that greets a birth and the “farewell” that lets a life go. The opening lines look back to the mother’s labour: “Once on a time you watched to welcome me,” with “tears and a faithful heart and brave mirth.” That welcome was costly. The mother endured “waiting and weariness and agony,” and the child was, to her, worth the price. But the speaker turns the thought around in line five: the months before birth are not the heaviest waiting. “Wearier than the months that wait for birth / Are those that wait for death.” At the centre of the poem is a reversal of roles—the one who was waited for must now wait, without power, for the one who did the waiting to depart.
The poem is built as a Petrarchan sonnet, though its real emotional turn comes early, on the plain word “But.” In the octave the same rhyme group runs from “mirth” through “worth,” “birth,” and “earth,” so that beginning and ending are rhymed together. The metre is mostly iambic pentameter, but the voice keeps breaking its own composure. The dash after “death” acts like a caught breath. Then the line “How shall I be / Still while you are so still?” splits the phrase “be still” across a line break, making the speaker’s restlessness audible. The repeated “still” carries two meanings at once—calm and motionless—and neither is bearable. The child cannot be calm, and the mother is too motionless. “Unbrokenhearted your slow steps from earth” turns dying into a departure that can be watched, step by step.
In the sestet the imagery becomes more ceremonial. “White watchers gather near to hark / The soul’s approach, the heralding of the horn.” The word “watchers” reaches back to the mother who “watched to welcome” the child; now the child and others watch the mother leave. The whiteness suggests both a sickroom and something angelic, so the bedside becomes a silent ritual. They strain to hear “the tread / Of the free soul retreating down the dark.” Death is not abrupt here; it has a footstep. The soul is “free,” but its freedom is only visible to those left behind, and the image of it retreating “down the dark” keeps the poem from easy comfort.
What makes the final two lines so significant is their almost brutal symmetry. “Mothers who wait for children to be born, / Children who wait for mothers to be dead.” The grammar is nearly identical, but the directions are opposite. One vigil looks toward an arrival, the other toward an ending. Welles does not soften that inequality with a moral or a consolation. Instead, the sonnet’s controlled rhymes and balanced lines give shape to the very thing they cannot control. “Hail and Farewell” is a small, severe map of how love reverses itself across a lifetime: the person welcomed into the world becomes the person who must learn to say goodbye.